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New Caterham F1 team owners to give ax to ugly 2014 car nose

The Caterham Formula One car could be ditching its anteater-style news for a more traditional front as early as the Belgian Grand Prix. Photo by LAT PHOTOGRAPHIC

New-look car will be part of a hopeful new direction for Formula One backmarker

The distinctive nose on Caterham's 2014 Formula One car could be the victim of a development push by new owners.

"New management, new nose, new hope," read a report in the German language Speed Week, referring to Caterham's plans to press ahead in the wake of the Tony Fernandes era. Fernandes, the team’s founder, announced the sale of the team to a consortium earlier this month.

Caterham is currently last in the Constructors' standings, after its traditional backmarker rival Marussia finally broke into the points in Monaco.

Finishing last in 2014 -- a statistic that new bosses Colin Kolles and Christijan Albers are determined to avoid -- could mean the loss of about $20 million in official prize money. And so it seems Caterham's new Swiss-Middle Eastern owners have approved a timely development push.

Italy's Omnicorse claims departed backer Fernandes essentially blocked the further development of the uncompetitive CT04 car while he contemplated selling the Leafield-based team. The new management has now OK’d further development of the 2014 car.

The report said that, on Tuesday, a 60-percent model of the car entered the state-of-the-art Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, with the fruits of the work scheduled to debut at the Belgian Grand Prix following the summer break on Aug. 24.

The most significant visual improvement will be a "more efficient nose,” the article in Speed Week claims.

The “double nose” on the CT04, arguably one of the ugliest innovations in F1 history, is expected to be gone at Spa-Francorchamps in August. But, before that, the new nose would require a new FIA crash test.

"We obviously have a lot of work to do," said team boss and former Minardi driver Albers. "We're prepared for the challenges ahead."

In 2015, it is expected that every car on the grid will feature more aesthetically pleasing nose designs. Next year's rules have addressed the issue of the unseemly and unpopular anteater-style noses.

"We can't legislate against ugly cars, but what we can do is to try to get closer to what was originally intended,” said the FIA's completion boss Charlie Whiting. "They [will] have to be a certain height and a certain width and they must be symmetrical about the car center line.”